A 90-year-old Akron, Ohio, woman who shot herself as sheriff's deputies tried to evict her from her foreclosed home became a symbol of the nation's home mortgage crisis Friday.

"There's a lot of people like Miss Polk right now. That's the sad thing about it," said Akron City Council President Marco Sommerville, who had met Polk before and rushed to the scene when contacted by police. "They might not be as old as her, some could be as old as her. This is just a major problem."

A judge of the New Jersey Superior Court has prohibited the scheduled release of a report on the security and accuracy of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. Last June, Judge Linda Feinberg ordered Sequoia Voting Systems to turn over its source code to me (serving as an expert witness, assisted by a team of computer scientists) for a thorough examination. At that time she also ordered that we could publish our report 30 days after delivering it to the Court--which should have been today.

TVNL Comment: And we the people should suppress this judge's oxygen supply!

Of five prominent women interviewed three years ago by The Independent for an article on post-Taliban female emancipation, three, including Ms Kakar, are dead and a fourth has had to flee after narrowly escaping assassination in an ambush in which her husband was killed.

TVNL Comment: The US invaded Iraq to overthrow a government that gave women total equality without the restraints of Sharia law. Today, the women of Iraq are once again under fundamentalist rule and are not better off than those in Afghanistan

"Washington threatened to use any means to seize Iraqi assets if we do not support the security pact," Marsadiraq quoted Talabani as saying.

Washington currently seeks to sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Baghdad to give legal basis to its military and political presence in oil-rich Iraq after a UN mandate defining its status expires on December 31.

The wife of a Fort Drum soldier says a once-a-month meeting with a doctor isn't enough for her husband who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The Peuchots were told that health facilities on Fort Drum were understaffed and that Spc. Peuchot could be seen only once a month, Mrs. Peuchot said. A request to seek off-post treatment was denied, she said.

Over-the-counter cough and cold medicines should not be sold for young children because they are unproven and can be dangerous, doctors and consumer advocates said on Thursday, despite objections from industry representatives.

An M4 machine gun sent to Iraq by the Blackwater private security firm somehow disappeared from the company's storage facility in Baghdad and was later discovered during a US military operation, apparently against suspected insurgents, people familiar with the situation have told ABC News.

The incident, in 2006, has been kept secret until now but it raised more questions about Blackwater's operations in Iraq.

Allegations that Blackwater shipped weapons and silencers to Iraq without proper licensing are already under investigation by a federal grand jury in North Carolina, according to people familiar with the case.